When Andrea and I were planning our wedding, the logistics, at times, got pretty challenging. She was in D.C., I was in Birmingham, and the actual wedding was taking place on the Mississippi coast.
Slowly but surely, that seemingly insurmountable mountain of To-Do items fell into the "Done" column. At a time when phones still carried long-distance charges, we coordinated a number of things remotely. Church and reception hall? Check. Caterers and flowers? Done. Announcements, invites, formal and everyday china, and silverware. All the devilish details were falling into line. Then, as the day started to loom large, we were stymied by another hurdle.
Mississippi required blood tests before issuing a marriage license. Because Andrea and I were both out of state, it meant that by the time we delivered blood samples and waited the appropriate processing time, we would have missed our wedding date.
A slew of anxious phone calls with health department officials didn't end in any resolution. Then, after more phone calls, we became aware that the grand state of Alabama did not require blood tests to issue a marriage license. With a conspiratorial sigh, we got the required paperwork in order.
One more impediment remained. At the time we applied for an Alabama marriage license, there was a state law on the books that made interracial marriages illegal. After the wedding festivities, Andrea and I went to the Lee County courthouse in Opelika, Alabama, to turn in our signed marriage license. We arrived at the courthouse, and as hand in hand we approached, an odd thing happened.
Nothing.
No state troopers or sheriff's deputies barred our entry to the building. The county clerk who received our paperwork didn't make any snide remarks. Back outside, there were no throngs of protestors forming a gauntlet for the two of us to navigate.
One thing Andrea and I never had to consider was the consequences of running afoul of miscegenation laws, or laws prohibiting interracial marriages. These state laws were basically defanged in 1967 when the United States Supreme Court ruled laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In this, Andrea and I owe a great debt to Mildred and Richard Loving. Their story has been told in several movies, one of which we watched this past summer. The two of them were the ones who lived through the ignominy of being arrested for marrying outside their respective race, dealt with an establishment that refused to recognize their relationship, and constantly contended with crowds threatening violence.
While Alabama was the last state to officially repeal its miscegenation laws by drafting a new constitution in 2000, it wasn't just an Alabama thing. My home state of Mississippi's version of the law, repealed with the state's 1987 constitution, explicitly listed Asians as a race whites were forbidden to marry.
Before you get dismissive and think, "Pfft. What would you expect of Mississippi and Alabama?", it's not even just a deep south thing. The Old Line State of Maryland, where Andrea and I currently reside, once had miscegenation laws pointedly forbidding whites to marry Filipinos. That actually made me smile. When an entire state once thought you were such a threat to the established order that they made a law just for you, I think it speaks well of one's badassery.
At our wedding reception, the first song Andrea and I danced to was Travis Tritt's "Drift Off to Dream". However, this modern era release by Journey and Filipino frontman, Arnel Pineda, would also have been on the set list.
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